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Fundamental Concepts of Children's Literature Research: Literary and Sociological Approaches. By Hans-Heino Ewers. Trans. from German by William J. McCann. New York and London: Routledge, 2009.
Reviewed by J. D. Stahl
Hans-Heino Ewers, the director of the Institut für Jugendbuchforschung (Institute for Children's Literature Research) at the Johann-Wolfgang- Goethe Universität in Frankfurt/Main and an influential German scholar of children's literature, is the author of this basic theoretical text explicating his approach to children's literature study and interpretation. This work is a translation and revision of his Literatur für Kinder und Jugendliche: eine Einführung in grundlegende Aspekte des Handlungs- und Symbolsystems Kinder- und Jugendliteratur (München: Fink, 2000). Ewers conceives of his study, emulating Göte Klingberg's Barnlitteraturforskning- En Introduktion (1972), as "defining only those general and fundamental qualities of the object [of study] that transcend all periods as well as its basic frame of reference, and [seeking] to fix them terminologically" (2). Thus, he does not intend this book to be "an introduction to German-or German-language . . . children's literature" (2). Nevertheless, its usefulness to Anglo-American scholars of children's literature is likely to be primarily in presenting the conceptual and historical framework of post-World War II German children's literature scholarship. The first part of the book, "Literary Communication with Children and Young People" (somewhat misleadingly shortened to "Children's Literary Communication" in the translation), employs structuralist ideas such as Genette's concepts of the epitext, the paratext, and the peritext to explore the "twofold communication" that Ewers regards as normative for literature aimed at a young reading audience. He seeks to limit "intended children's reading" (as opposed to "actual children's reading") thus: "School reading material should also be excluded from the second corpus [actual children's reading], which would then only include all the texts or works that are actually read by children outside of school instruction and unconnected with it" (19). However, one of the realizations that emerges from reading Ewers's discussion is that German children's literature scholarship is more closely bound up with the history of...